Equational

A classical way to look at parallel / distributed systems is in terms of: Work-Efficiency Parallelism Locality  This is one of those inconsistent triads  (or trilemma ), where only two among three properties can be chosen. For example, a system can have both work-efficiency and parallelism, or parallelism and locality but cannot be fully work-efficient, parallel and local. This is not the only inconsistent triads to think about when designing scalable systems. Here are more: Velocity Resources Work Momentum Quality Traffic And of course the CAP theorem's: Consistency Availability Partition tolerance And the important: Fast Good Cheap All of these are ultimately important, yet some of these are more practically useful. Especially when you realise that you can weaken the inconsistent of these triads by introducing additional complementary properties.  To illustrate this with examples: Two people must work together vs an engineer and a sales person must work together Two tim...

Failing smart   My agile mantra is much: "Failures must bring you closer to your vision" It is a mantra I have often used. And very much how I approach agile innovation (e.g. see Search and Vision for Systematic Innovation ) However... It is only partially true, as failure may happen simply because you are disorganised, with no relations to your vision. Fixing organisation issues helps avoid drifting further away from your vision, it does not bring you closer to your vision! Still, unmanaged organisational issues will eventually consume you 'from within', therefore they too must be addressed. Can we focus on fixing organisation issues? Can we identify a subset of failures as 'organisational failures', and others as 'non-organisational failures on the way to our vision'? The simple answer is yes! Yet we most know what we are looking for. Six types of failures When I act as agile manager I try to distinguish between six types of failures. These are: F...